I Organized My Kids’ Play Food by Color, and We’re Never Going Back

I recently wrote about my life for the show “Get Organized with The Home Edit” on Netflix, and how it inspired me to use their rainbow organization system in our apartment. My family binge watched both seasons of the show together in a matter of days. Our daughters love to see the before-and-after reveals of all those colorful, organized spaces. They’ve even taken to role-playing as the show’s hosts when they tidy up their playroom!

One of my new favorite ways to use the rainbow organizing method is to organize my girls’ play food. In our playroom, we have two 3-tier shelf basket towers that we use to store play food and kitchen accessories. We used to organize play food by category (i.e. a basket for each food group) or by type (i.e. plastic food, wooden food, etc). But the girls dump out the baskets when they’re looking for a specific item, and after playing everything gets tossed back into random baskets. The result is that this area always looked like a jumbled mess.

So, one morning when I was feeling overwhelmed with the visual clutter in our playroom, I decided to apply the rainbow organization system to the play food in their play kitchen. I emptied all of the play food into the floor of their playroom and sorted the items by color. I identified six color groups and then designated a shelf basket for each color. After I finished organizing the play food, I showed the girls the new system. They said that it was beautiful! 

Now they use this color-coded system to quickly and easily tidy up when they’re done playing with their play food. If you’re struggling with visual clutter in a play space, try categorizing play items into a rainbow. You may find it not only looks better, but actually creates an organizational system your kids can maintain!

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